This week’s podcast is packed full of useful tips and explanations. I recommend listening to it in full. It also dovetails nicely with last week’s theme. Here is the link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/how-to-academy-podcast/id1298460455?i=1000671772093
The topic of conversation on The How To Academy is, can ambitious people be happy, or is stress and anxiety part and parcel of what it means to be a high achiever? The guest is clinical psychologist, Mary Anderson:
“A practical, efficiency-loving lady. I really wanted to provide a toolbox for people that they can start using for short-term and long-term happiness and high achievement.”
Mary starts by describing the “troublesome trifecta”—three common cognitive distortions that plague high achievers.
“A cognitive distortion is an unhelpful thought that originates from erroneous assumptions, misinterpretations, faulty beliefs. And what those cognitive distortions do is needlessly ratchet up our anxiety and stress, and keep us stuck behaviourally.
The first one is all or nothing thinking. Black and white thinking where we’re needlessly forcing a dichotomy. I need to be perfect. This needs to be just right. Or I’m a failure.
The second one is jumping to conclusions and this comes in two flavors. Negative fortune telling and we want to catch that because we don’t want it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and mind reading. That’s when we assume we know what someone else is thinking about us. They think I’m incompetent. They don’t like me.
And the last one here are should statements. I should be able to handle all of this. I should be doing more. And so those shoulds just make us feel badly. Often we should ourselves, but we can also should other people and situations.”
This is such a helpful lens to look through when we’re feeling stressed and anxious. Mary reminds us that the path of least resistance leads us to black and white thinking, negative fortune telling, mind-reading and should statements.
When you’re helping a friend, it’s easier to see where they are falling into these traps. We can see that black and white thinking is leading to procrastination, negative fortune-telling can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and mind reading and shoulding is keeping them paralysed and falling short of everything that they could achieve.
“So what can we do about it? What we’re going to do is equip ourselves with tools that we can use in those moments of overwhelm, stress and anxiety.”
Mary has a three-step process for dealing with our faulty cognitions.
“The first step is you’re going to ask yourself this question, what am I telling myself right now? Because that thought that you’re focused on is what’s contributing to that anxiety and stress.Then we have to go to step two, which is how is my thought not necessarily true?
Are our thoughts facts? No, they’re just thoughts. And so when we start to question the veracity of those thoughts, the accuracy of those thoughts, and say, hey, this isn’t even necessarily true, that’s what’s going to help decrease that level of anxiety.
And then the final step of the three-step process is new and improved self-talk. And that is once we’ve questioned the accuracy of a thought, we say to ourselves, okay, the last question is, what is a more helpful thought to focus on? And that’s important because again, it’s going to help us manage our emotions and move us forward.”
Mary also discusses the nervous system, perfectionism, navigating uncertainty with curiosity, feeling enough, neuroplasticity, setting realistic goals and the S.E.L.F. of self-care. It’s definitely worth a listen or two.
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